Right now, we all have plenty of time at home in isolation to put to good use. Perhaps time that could be well spent making a plan for how you realise your dream adventure after all, in 2021.<\/p>\n
Coronavirus aside, if you’re still on the fence, we sought out some advice from older people who, indeed, put off travel \u2014 and who regret not jumping sooner, now they’ve finally got a taste of adventure. Here\u2019s why you should seize the moment, whenever you possibly can.<\/p>\n
Experiences are more valuable than stuff<\/h3>\n
![\"Louise](\"\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/01\/Louise-and-husband-in-My-Son-in-Vietnam-1024x683.jpg\")
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Two years ago, Louise and her husband Joe (above) decided to quit their jobs and sell their house in New York and hit the road. \u201cYes! We absolutely wish we\u2019d done it sooner,\u201d says Louise. They\u2019d always loved to travel and used to wish they could do more than the typical two-week trip, but it wasn\u2019t until they were in their 50s they hit that now-or-never point.<\/p>\n
Read more: 18 moments of adventure travel you don’t want to miss<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n \u201cWe were tired of working too hard to pay for stuff we didn’t really need, so we set a date, made a plan, sold our house and the majority of our stuff. It\u2019s been a spectacular two years,\u201d says Louise, who chronicles the adventure at Two Lost Americans<\/a>.\u00a0 The couple have since lived in everywhere from Italy and Thailand to Vietnam, Malaysia and Singapore.<\/p>\n Helen, a 59-year-old from London who travels with her husband Roy, started 2018 with two months in the Philippines, followed by shorter breaks around Europe and six weeks in Madagascar, before finishing the year off with two months in Thailand.<\/p>\n \u201cWe mainly choose countries that are far-flung and make people ask, ‘Why are you going there?’\u201d says Helen. She highly recommends keeping a journal: \u201cWhen we’re old and unable to get far, we can relive our travels by reading my journals and looking through photographs.\u201d<\/p>\n Suzanne spent 25 years in the \u201ccrash and burn lane\u201d working ten-hour days as a lawyer before she decided to swap it in for a life on the road, as a 60-something. Soon, though, she realised she was in too deep to give up work entirely: \u201cI found that too much of my identity was invested in my legal career for me to quit lawyering cold turkey,\u201d Suzanne writes on her blog Boomeresque<\/a>. She\u2019s kept her law licence active and now has a flexible workload that she can do anywhere, as she travels the world with her husband Steve.<\/p>\n Read more: What I learnt from my mum’s gap year<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n You don\u2019t have to travel permanently like Suzanne does to enjoy a working holiday,\u00a0though. Remote work is easy now and a year or even a month of living in a foreign city is likely to bring new energy to your work. You might even enjoy this kind of travel more than a vacation, as being part of the working population makes you more a part of the everyday fabric of a place.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m glad that I didn\u2019t really travel until I was 28. It would be a waste of money, I think, to travel just to party overseas,\u201d says traveller Julie, also in her 60s.<\/p>\n Julie favours \u201cslow\u201d travel. \u201cInstead I partied at home and travelled when I was interested in experiencing other things.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cBad back, bad knees! Until we age we don\u2019t appreciate how restrictive ageing can be,\u201d says Julie, who\u2019s travelled all over the world from Zimbabwe<\/a> to Nepal<\/a>, New Zealand to Jordan<\/a>.<\/p>\n Of course, many people continue to enjoy travel into old age.<\/p>\n But if you want to climb the 1,001 steps up Chamundi Hill in Mysore in India, there are no guarantees that you\u2019ll always be able to. Michael and his wife Debbie were 68 and 58 respectively when they sold everything to become nomads, and what started as a six-month trial run is still going strong.<\/p>\n Five years later, they\u2019ve visited well over 200 cities. \u201cWe only go round once in life, so summon up all your courage and go for it,\u201d Michael said to the AirBnB blog. \u201cWhy wait?\u201d<\/p>\n Life happens: you get a new job, maybe you get married, maybe you get divorced, people around you get sick. There\u2019s always something, so if the time seems good to take three months to backpack around South America, you might want to grab the chance before that window closes.<\/p>\n Waiting until \u201csomeday\u201d may lead to disappointment: when he asked 1,000 seniors about their advice for life, Karl Pillemer, a gerontologist at Cornell University, found that travelling \u201cearly and often\u201d<\/a> was a common refrain.<\/p>\n Read more: Why I’ll never travel with checked baggage again<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n Often people put it off because of cost, or kids, or because it would be easier in retirement: \u201cWe always thought we\u2019d do a lot of travelling when we retired, you know? But then Lynne passed away and it was too late,\u201d one 81-year-old told Pillemer, before eventually deciding to travel solo through the Canadian Rockies<\/p>\n When 50-somethings Louise and her husband decided to go travelling, both had okay jobs; but neither of them was headed to the CEO’s chair. This prompted them to consider living life differently: \u201cWe could imagine continuing to do the same thing for another 20 years and regretting it,\u201d says Louise.<\/p>\n Travelling when you\u2019re younger, perhaps with kids in tow, will be different than when you\u2019re older and relatively unencumbered. Steve, a 60-year-old from Essex reached out to us via the Silver Travel Advisor<\/a> forum to point out that travel is not necessarily an either-or situation:<\/p>\n \u201cSure, we\u2019ve all learned that life is short and that dramatic change to your circumstances can happen unexpectedly at any time. But we did travel prior to our senior years and had lots of fun,\u201d says Steve. \u201cTo have done something different would have deprived our family of the other experiences we had with them.\u201d<\/p>\n![\"Children](\"\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/01\/avel-chuklanov-686841-unsplash-1.jpg\")
<\/p>\nYour work will still be there (and you may be able to do it remotely)<\/h3>\n
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<\/p>\nUse those knees while you\u2019ve got\u2019em<\/h3>\n
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<\/p>\nIt\u2019s the things you don\u2019t do that you regret the most<\/h3>\n
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